One simple trick to dramatically improve your photography:

As an award winning professional photographer, I’m a control freak and by teaching you to control one simple factor your photography is going to improve dramatically. It doesn’t matter if you shoot on a smart phone, tablet, compact or DSLR camera….in fact, let me demonstrate with an iPhone and a free app!

When you ask your camera to take a picture it assesses the scene to find the average level of brightness (the exposure) because it does not know which part of the picture is important to you.

So, look at the picture below taken with the iPhone on auto:
The camera tries its best, but the cat is dark because the light from the window is very bright

Now if I simply tap the iPhone screen over the cat to tell the camera that the cat is important, the camera compensates for this back light and allows you to see the subject; as you can see it makes a huge difference.

Well done, you’ve just mastered the complex subject of spot metering and this function is available on most cameras, tablets, smart phones, etc. I used an iPhone 5 and a free app called ‘Camera Awesome’ which actually is awesome for the particularly simple way you can do this.

So, if you have an IOS device download Camera Awesome, for android try FV-5 (you can slide the exposure up and down which is not as good but does help)…and for all cameras check the spot metering section in your manual.

Oh, and sorry about the bad pictures of cats, but they did prove a point!

Subscribe below and in the forth coming weeks I’ll show you how to develop this further: My new ’30 second portrait sessions’ will teach you quick and simple setups to capture professional looking portraits.